Seems like everybody over on Slashnet's #perlmonks has
been playing with CSS lately. With all the
discussion, I felt the urge to dabble a bit and see
what I could come up with. I also wrote a lenthy
reflection which I've quarrantined in a
separate post
for everyone to ignore. ;-)

Anyway, I spent yesterday concocting some views of
my own little Monastery Gates, and I thought I'd share
my concoctions, such as they are. As all the
presentation information is set aside in .css
files, it was quite easy to create a few very
simple themes as well.

By the way, before you go anywhere, a few notes.
For one thing, peek at the code. Note that there
are no table tags. Layout is done entirely
with CSS.

Note also that the only links that go anywhere are
in the first post, 'Explanation'. Images of text
I turned into actual text... but as I have no idea
what sorts of fonts the average user has installed,
I simply supplied a long list, and hoped for the best.
And if you notice a few discrepancies here and there...
well, it's because there are a few discrepancies. :-)

The first one is a
Blue theme,
which is intended to look much like the Monastery's
default theme... it consists of valid XHTML and CSS,
and renders pretty well on Mozillas Konquerors,
and (I'm told) Internet Exporers of recent vintage.
Netscape 4.x is... well, just what you'd expect
(ie. really bad).

Then we have the
Pink theme.
The Pink CSS is valid, just like Blue's, but while
the Pink demo page is valid XML, it's not XHTML.
While I think a site-specific markup is a nifty
solution for PerlMonks, most browsers disagree.
Even developing it as I did, by looking at the page
in Mozilla, it became clear that while a valid XML
solution was possible, a nice one likely wasn't. Still
most of those drab <div> tags stuck in
there, only with some non-HTML tags mixed in.

And finally, the
Green theme.
Green's demo page is a bit messier... it's in the state
in which I first (mostly) achieved the look I wanted on
Mozilla. Neither the CSS nor the HTML is valid... I'd
be somewhat surprised to find that it rendered properly
on anything but Mozilla and its kin.

This is a very provisional effort, but I hope enough
to interest people. Feel free to grab the code and
play with it... see what other site features you can
implement. Or turn a stylesheet into a template,
molest it with your choice of templating module, and
serve it up via CGI for more interesting dynamic themes.
Or clean up what I've done; I'm very much a dilettante
with this sort of thing. Or make some more creative
themes. I've only made very minor changes... it would
be possible, using the Blue XHTML page, to render a
page which looked totally different than what we're
used to.

Credit goes to OeufMayo's evil twin 'Briac' for
the div.footer style info, which we both stumbled
over for some time. He picked up my code and played
with it for a good while, and might have something
interesting to show for it. If so, I expect he'll
post a link.

Update: Upon reflection, having only one theme
that most people can even hope to see is a drag. Thus,
I have created the new
Mojo-Jojo Theme.
It is truly obnoxious. After gimping Jojo, I'd say
creating the theme took about 4 minutes.

The themes look great, and I'm glad to see you using CSS classes, as such themes can then be 'overriden' by the end user with ease. When/if PM gets to use CSS in a more functional manner, it will be very easy for individaul users to create their own themes and the like (Some have suggested that PM could store these themes for users as well, which isn't too hard as well).

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com
||
"You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important

Can I give this a double ++? For a while I have felt that site developers should be more aggressive in moving towards current standards (like XHTML, CSS . . .) So someone with Navigator 3.0 or IE 2.0 can see the site? Tough cookies. There is the "web standards project" (or something like that, sorry, no link at present) that is suggesting people have their markup to tell people with broken browsers (including Netscape 4.7 and lower) that they need to update their browser.

I am running IE5.5 here, and the pink and blue themes would not display. The blue theme looked great.

While I'm all for moving with the Standards, I think it seriously depends on the application IMHO. Would you want to force people to upgrade to purchase something from you? I think not. For some sites, it's fine to push the envelope, but if you are expecting someone to give you the priviledge of their cash (when their is probably hundreds of other sites selling the same thing in the same price range), I think you have to bend to the user.

I'm not suggesting that you aim for IE 2 but sites should degrade nicely for users with at least 4.* browsers.